A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: “Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell’s SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows.”
Not happening at all. Should, wish to and will is three different things. And i personally wish for neither, i would prefer if there was no windows mobile.
“Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell’s SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows.”
I just threw up in my mouth…
MS wont source anything, ever, it’s against their stance that “0P3|\| $0r3z 1z t3h 3b1L n |-|@X0rz \/\/1ll $73@L t3h uR 3y3 p33z”
They would more likely try to buy Novell just to gut them like a fish and run them into the ground.
This won’t happen.
The reason microsoft wants to be in mobile is that it wants the microsoft software stack and development tools (.net, Silverlight) to be as ubiquitous as possible (win32 api was their “crown jewel” before). Apart from that, having a phone OS has no inherent value for them.
Having a phone OS may not have any value to them now, but in five to ten years that may have changed.
Cellphones are getting more and more powerful each day, and more and more data and applications ends up in the cloud. A cell phone connected to an ordinary keyboard and a large screen could very well be the desktop of the future. Some phone already have HDMI connectors for a large screen.
ok, i know, novell is a company, working for profit, opensuse is only a product, blah blah blah.
contributors are working (both paid and volunteered) with love on this thing, which seems to you only as a product. i wouldnt like to see microsoft taking over it.
screw open source, you all bussinessmen. open source is when bussinessmen leech the free software projects made with love.
(im not even an opensuse user)
It would be rather hypocritical, for a company that once referred to Linux as a cancer, to acquire SUSE.
But it is still possible to get away with that kind of hypocrisy, just look at Steve Jobs and Apple. Megahertz Myth, anyone?
That’s bull. Apple never abandoned the MHz Myth. On the contrary Intel adopted it. For that very reason Pentium 4 clock speeds were insanely high (3.8 GHz over 5 years ago!), but Intel had a change of mind and abandoned the dead-end P4 “NetBurst” technology and produced the current Core CPUs from an even older P3 base.
Even today’s Core CPUs don’t reach that clock speed. They are faster than any P4, though, because they do much more work at once which is precisely the argument Apple brought up for PowerPC CPUs vs. Pentium CPUs.
Your fundamental argument is true nonetheless.
You can get away with it. Your example was just incorrect (should’ve written Intel instead of Steve Jobs).
Uh…
That’s not “adopting” the “MHz Myth”, just a demonstration of the grain of truth that it was based on.
If Intel had truly adopted the MHz Myth, they would have started selling 1 GHz Coppermine P3s again & claimed that they were faster than 3Ghz P4s based on contrived Photoshop benchmarks.
So a processor with four 2.2GHz cores doesn’t reach the clock speed of a P4 with a single 3.8Ghz core? Only if your OS can’t properly utilize all of the cores.
Even Apple claimed that their switch to Intel had more to do with energy efficiency than any raw speed advantage of the Core CPUs.
The difference being that the performance advantages of the Core CPUs vs. the P4 actually exist.
How was Intel hypocritical? They realized Netburst was a dead-end and moved one of their other architectures to the forefront (one that they had continued selling and pushing for certain uses, even at the height of their enthusiasm for Netburst). They hadn’t spent a decade touting the utter, absolute superiority of the P4 as Apple had done with PPC.
In order to be a true hypocrite, one must go against previously stated values. Are there any real values a company holds other than “make as much money as possible” ? If not, then the only hypocritical companies are the ones that file chapter 7 bankruptcy.
I think it requires a real naivete that I completely lack to accuse a multi-billion dollar company of hypocrisy.
Well when the prices of these Apple based and Android based tablets drop in price over the next few years, people are going to want them.
The problem is Microsoft has nothing going for it in this area of tablets.
They can be successful, but they have choice little but to jump into the open source way of doing things.
They already giving away Microsoft Office away for free in the cloud in order compete with Google docs, and anyone working in business/corporate world are still likely going to want a word processor incorporated in a tablet.
So, Microsoft, go ahead and buy Novell, give up on selling Office directly and open source it for Windows and Linux platforms. Then incorporate it into a tablet running on a version of SuSE that fits you, heck you can even make it look like Windows, with Linux running under the hood.
Face it, if Windows 7 could run on a tablet, it would already be on a tablet now. It’s not, and likely not going to be.
Ballmer will either need to suck it up, and do the thing he doesn’t want to do in order to keep Microsoft going, or he is the one that needs to be going and his replacement will do what needs to be done.
I don’t hate RHEL or anything, but the last thing I want is an enterprise linux monoculture. Novell at least keeps some competition in that space, not just on price, but more importantly on technology. RHEL evolves slowly for a reason, but with no Novell and waning commercial UNIX, the pace could turn glacial.
Actually, RHEL develops at the same pace as Fedora, just with fewer updates in between versions. When RHEL 6 comes out it will be up to date with Fedora 13. RHEL just does all its changing at much longer intervals. Which is what you want in the enterprise. No enterprise user (except maybe if you are using it as a desktop) really wants RHEL changing every 6 months.
The enterprise world has long been tired of the distro wars and is going to standardize around RHEL.
I noticed CPANEL now only supports RHEL and FreeBSD:
http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpanelwhm/system-requirements.html
I understand the motivation, but it’s short term thinking–RH salesmen will finish a lot of water cooler conversations with “But hey, what are they going to do, switch to HP-UX?…har har har”. In the long term, there’s nothing good about a lack of competition unless you’re the guy with no competition.
So a single vendor counts for the whole enterprise IT ecosystem?
Even if Microsoft did what the article described, would they be successful? I think either they just wouldn’t really get it, or people would shun them out of fear.
He didn’t once explain how they are hindered by their existing OS line.
The mistake MS made was waiting too long to improve their mobile offering. Lacking a Linux distro has nothing to do with it.
They haven’t even released wp7 and Matt is suggesting a purchase of Novell to save themselves? Ridiculous.
He suggestion of attracting LAMP developers is also silly. They already get Linux for free so why should they buy Windows Server?
Matt Asay is an open source advocate who should keep his fantasy of MS saving Novell and embracing Linux to himself.
Edited 2010-07-31 17:55 UTC
Users care about UI and features.
Developers care about simple, capable APIs.
Since there is no technical reason why they cannot create a good UI and API for CE/WP, they’ve no reason to create them on Linux instead.
All that boils down to saying that the platform is largely irrelevant from both the user and the app developers’ standpoint. The user/dev experience is what counts, and there is no valid reason they can’t deliver it with Windows but can with Linux.